


On Fate

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Holidays, Mother-Son Relationship, Sister-Sister Relationship, Sisters, coming home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:14:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The conundrum of paths and walkers aside, settling into one's determined fate can be difficult, particularly among the people who expected something so different from you. Sameth comes home to Belisaere and faces his own disappointments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HardModePlus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HardModePlus/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, HardModePlus! I wish I could say that your story leaped fully-formed from my head as soon as I saw your prompts, but I let it percolate for a while. Then I started writing and the story took on a life of its own, and I began to worry that it had strayed too far from your expressed desires, until I looked back to your prompts and found that all my percolating had led to this.
> 
> May your Yuletide be bright and warm, and may this story be all you had hoped to see from these beloved characters we share.

On the third day of early winter, Prince Sameth returns to Belisaere by whistle and sky, to the welcome of clear-toned bells echoing across the city. The iron-and-silver bells, enormous and six in total, are his creation and gift to the city. They were cast in his workshop, webbed with silver veins and Charter magic Sam cast himself. They are not entirely like the ones his mother and aunt wear across their chest, they are much more modest in their power. A practical gift to commemorate the work of their Abhorsen queen; a gentle precaution to defend the capital. 

Housed in the sprawling water tower complex above the city reservoir, Sam hears them immediately when his Paperwing curves along the coast and Belisaere appears beside the water. The glowing red orb emitting sputtering rays of sunlight sinks just beneath the horizon as he circles for landing on the Palace roof, and Sam smiles when he recognizes that they are ringing Ranna and Dyrim for all the children trudging sleepily toward their beds. 

Two figures emerge from the shadows near the Charter-lights when Sam’s feet touch to the flagstones and he removes the enchanted goggles he wears during flight.

Ellimere beams at him from beneath an enormous, fur-lined hood. Her hands are tucked into a snowy white muff, but she hands it off to a Charter servant and embraces him when he staggers, pins in his legs, toward his welcome. 

“It is too cold out for you to have made the trip,” she chides and waves over their father, who is wearing a much lighter cloak that Sam also recognizes as his own work, with the help of a palace weaver. King Touchstone moves freely beneath it, but his hands are as warm as Ellimere’s when he extends them to his son.

Sam trades a weary smile with him when his father grips his forearm in greeting. 

The King asks, “Do you bring good news?” and Sam considers before he nods.

He settles on telling them that the damage to the Wall, the thing that brought he and Lirael from Belisaere weeks before, will be reversible. Touchstone doesn’t appear disturbed by the news, but his mouth holds its unyielding shape. No doubt that the topic will arise again once he has considered it thoroughly.

For the time, however, Ellimere tucks her hand into the crook of his arm and leads him toward the warmth of the building. He flew through a large snowstorm over the Midlands, so powerful that his whistles were nearly lost to shrieks of the wind. He swallows and gives his goggles over to yet another Charter servant waiting at the door, who also divests him of his cloak and mail, leaving him in his trowel-studded tunic shimmering in the glowing Charter light.

When the door to the cold closes heavily behind them, and they have begun their descent to the primary levels of the palace, he turns to his father and sister. 

“Has Lirael made it to the city yet?” 

Sam is troubled to think that Lirael is still away. She left him just after they completed the initial survey of the Wall, to pursue another lead on the necromancer they have been chasing for months now, with the assurance that she would meet him in Belisaere.

“She sent a message,” Ellimere tells him with a smile. “It arrived just a few days ago. She said she had news to bring, but…” 

“We have posted a watch at the Belis Mouth. We expected her not long after you.” When Touchstone turns over his shoulder and spies the trepidation on Sam’s face, his mouth lifts in a faint smile.

“Lirael is the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and your aunt. There is nothing to fear. Come, you can change out of your travel clothes and warm up before you come down to dinner.”

As they descend, Ellimere talks endlessly of affairs around the Kingdom with Sam, as much to engage their father with her work as to keep in informed of what is happening since he left. Sam has not been left with much time to adjust to his new role, nor has Ellimere. He suspects she is chattering out of concern for him, relief he is home, and though there is nothing to suggest a dire matter weighing on her mind, Sam thinks that Ellimere has perhaps missed his presence in Belisaere.

He has been around very little since the great sealing of the Destroyer. There is so much to be done, old constructs of his predecessors that have fallen to ruin without the upkeep of the royal line. Sabriel and Touchstone did much for repairing the damaged Charter stones around the kingdom during their reign, but there is always more to be done. The world changed greatly in those centuries without Dyrim’s line, and the damage is evident in the recovering Kingdom. Still, Sam is not afraid of work.

What is strange is this, his homecoming to Belisaere. He is still Prince Sameth here, not Wallmaker Renewed. As a child and as a growing man, Sam had been heavy-hearted with the expectation that he would inherit his mother’s title. The memory of those feelings is tied to this city, the palace complex and the people here who remember him as Prince and Abhorsen Apparent. 

As he emerges from the passageway into his father’s warm study, Sam recalls all of those feelings, and forgets to breathe as himself. Ellimere had always been regal and self-assured in her future, something that had left Sam feeling she was bossy, privileged to _want_ her destiny. Now he is settled into his own proper destiny, knows the sense of ownership Ellimere has always had for himself, and he has not entirely been able to make sense of his role in this home that had once been a place of caged despair.

Sensing his discomfort, Touchstone lays aside his cloak and signs a mark to kindle the fire in his great hearth. 

“Welcome home, Sameth,” he says, and finally embraces his son. “Go and change. Your mother is waiting for word of Lirael, but she will be glad to see her wandering son.” 

A smile twitches finally in the corner of Sam’s mouth, and he laughs weakly when one of the more brazen Charter summonings tugs urgently on his cold tunic, indicating that he does not have long before he will be forced to comply.

“I’m sure she’ll be happier to see me if I smell less,” Sam quips, and nods to the King and his heir, just as Ellimere begins to tell him, in her piercing way, that their mother will surely not mind if he comes to her now. 

This is home, he thinks while winding the familiar halls to his old room and when he steps into the room. It is not dusty, nor does it smell unused, and it is just as he left it, with a few abandoned projects scattered among his childhood creations. Sam lifts one of them from the desk, and looks out the window to the city beneath the hill. The sky has darkened completely, but the stars are masked with the long, reaching fingers of the storm he fought to come home. 

The bells are no longer ringing, but the streets are lined with thousands of Charter lights, burning every imaginable color for miles. The festival of darkness had begun while he was away at the Wall, though it is nothing but a tiny footnote in his thick-papered calendar he had forgotten to take note of while away. Sam smiles to himself. The streets are likely full of revelers dressed in bright hues, their Charter marks shining on their foreheads as they parade the streets with shouts and singing. Those who are not in the streets will have candles and Charterlight burning through their homes, drinking late-harvest wine and keeping vigil against the pressing darkness outside. 

Ellimere’s anxious fluttering makes sense now, as does his mother’s impatience for Lirael’s delayed arrival. No doubt they knew of the storm and the dangers Sam and Lirael had been chasing, but Sam wonders, as the sound of singing rises from the city to his window, if they had wanted to keep vigil together, and none of them alone in the dark.

*

Queen Sabriel is waiting for Sam in the highest tower of the library, where she has her own study. Like the King’s study, there are maps to cover the bare stone-and-wood walls, but they are heavily annotated with ink and Charter magic. There is the Wall, a mark where Sam and Lirael have come from to show where the stones were blasted through and Dead and Charter magic leaked through into Ancelstierre.

There are Charter stones marked, too, orbs that glow dimly against his mother’s pale face in the chilly room. Sabriel does not need to keep her rooms so warm as Touchstone, something Sam recalls from even his youngest memories of his mother. He thought then she was perhaps permanently changed by the icy touch of Death, especially when he experienced it the first time and felt then he would never be warm again. Now, he thinks it is more her personal disposition, or an inner warmth that stabilizes her in the face of all that she has seen in her life. 

“Mother,” Sam greets her with a clumsy smile she returns with effortless delight when she comes to him. She is wearing a plain black tunic and matching leather breeches, and her crow-black hair sweeps past Sam’s ears when she places her hands on his shoulders and hugs him like an equal, not her wayward, lost son too long away from home.

Sam’s hands shake nearly imperceptibly when he embraces Sabriel, who smells of asphodel and lemon, precisely as she has always smelled to him. He knows now that he is home at last, in this faintly familiar place that seems like the place he has always known.

“Has there been word of Aunt Lirael?”

“Nor any word that should concern us.” Sabriel lets him go and walks to the window again.

From her study, with its windows at every side, he can see the hills and the canals of Belisaere, the far-off mountains to the North, and the wide sea so near to them. The lanterns at Winding Point and Boom Hook are burning fiercely crimson, at alert. Sam frowns.

“She left the Wall before me,” he remarks, and remembers being brought to his mother’s office to explain any one of many childhood follies while she worked at her desk, or stood where she is now, looking out of the window. 

“And tracked the necromancer to the east, by way of the north.” Sabriel looks over her shoulder at him, faintly smiling, then beckons him closer, so that he may keep watch with her in the window. “You were busy with the Wall. We worried because of the storm, but you came through safely.” 

The lights of the city reflect in the darkness of his mother’s eyes, and they twinkle warmly. 

“You were always so safe.”

Sam wonders if his mother is thinking of their trips to Death, if she is remembering the time he wailed the first time he met his grandmother, her mother, by way of paper boat in the river of the dead. He had known then that he was meant to be Abhorsen, wondered if she had ever suspected her son was not meant to follow her path.

Does the walker choose the path…

Sam shakes off the quote from the Book of the Dead--it had always made him uncomfortable anyway. His path, one quite literally paved with the stones of his Wallmaker ancestors, has led him many places since it revealed itself, and Sam knows that he has spent so much time away from Belisaere because he was afraid it would lead him here, to his family; to facing up to the failed expectations they had set at his feet. 

“Perhaps too safe,” he replies faintly, hoping past hope that his mother cannot see the faded guilt on his countenance. 

Sabriel turns her head to the side, and reaches to bring her son closer without turning her face from the sea. 

“You know the saying,” she begins meaningfully, and Sam nods, close enough now for their reflections to appear side by side. It is enough for him to see just how alike they are, something that made him feel all the more resigned to his fate before, and how different they have become. 

“But I never chose this way.”

“Maybe it was your heart that chose. Maybe you were chosen for something more entirely. Still, whether you were chosen or otherwise, it is not for me to choose your path for you.”

As she spoke, the light from the distant Winding Post changes, from red to yellow. A sign, perhaps a warning. Sabriel pulls away finally, her eyes bespeaking her thoughts that it is a sign that Lirael has arrived, and her relief is apparent.. 

Sam wants to believe it is Lirael, too. If there is anyone who can understand his unsettled emotions, it is his aunt; his best friend. He forces himself to say: “It could be a trap. It could be merchants.” 

Sabriel ignores him, reaching for a deep blue cloak by the door and swinging it over her shoulders. “But it is my sister, your aunt, and we should be there to greet her.”

*

Lirael Goldenhand, Abhorsen-in-Waiting, returns by treacherous sea, soaked and grimy with layers of salt. The storm was no surprise, the Clayr had warned her it was coming when she left the Glacier behind.

And so, when she finally finished her business at Mount Aunden, burned and buried Bruzon’s body in the name of Kingdom and Charter, a boat seemed a more sensible solution than chancing the wind and clutching ice. The Paperwing would have been faster, but Lirael knows her whistle magic is not really strong enough to manage flying through the storm with ease, and so she puffs a breath over her gloved flesh hand and spreads her fingers wide, summoning marks of swiftness, lightness, steadiness, calming. 

The storm is still on land, but the tides are high and choppy and the air is frigid with the promise of snow. Lirael is cold and a little bitter and very much looking forward to the warm bath awaiting her in Belisaere. The lights of the city appeared shortly after she first saw the light from Winding Post, as she passed with Ilgard to the east, a red beacon to set herself to in the darkness that has grown larger every passing moment. Slowly, tucking her ice-cold hand into the crevice between her hunched torso and stiff, folded legs, Lirael raises her golden hand to the dark, clouding sky, and releases three blue Charter flares.

An answering glow comes immediately from the tower of Boom Hook, and three Charter Mages rush outside to greet her, banging one of Sam’s enormous replicas of Mosrael. A long rope shoots out, and Lirael catches it, pulling the boat to the nearest break in the high stone walls and immediately holding her hands up to allow the sergeant to test the mark on her forehead. A salty necromancer is no one’s idea of a welcome guest, but the sergeant nods, and smiles faintly when one of the keys on her dirty tunic glimmers weakly in the Charter light.

“Lady Lirael,” he says in faintly inspired tones, and Lirael nods to him, tossing her pack up to one of the guards before hauling herself up to the stone walkway.. 

“A pleasure, Sergeant,” she replies and grimaces at pins in her feet, grasping for the steadiness of the stone wall. 

He steps aside to allow her to maneuver next to him on the narrow walkway. “We expected you before the storm. Our barge will take you ahead to the Palace.”

Lirael’s eyebrows jump, but she nods as the sergeant waves to the heights of the tower, and the massive chain began to slacken. One of his guardsmen takes her small craft and announces it will be towed to the harbor, set aside for Lirael, who does not mind if she never sees it or the sea again.

Their respect is unusual, in the way the whispering awe that follows the shadow of her keyed tunic is unusual, and she reminds herself that she is not merely Lirael, Librarian and Failed Clayr. She is Lirael Goldenhand, Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and she has saved all of them from certain destruction. 

It is too strange to think of, so she ignores the unsettled oddness of it all as she limps after the sergeant. Above their heads, the light from Winding Post shifts to piercing blue, reflecting up to the clouds, down to the water, filling everything around them. There is the barge on the water, and two figures together on the barge in blue and black, respectively, which Lirael recognizes with a near-painful jolt of surprise.

With the bright blue light around Sabriel and Sam, the sight reminds her a little of the Glacier, but it is too different to be that alienating place. Her sister is smiling in her subtle way, silver veining her ink-black hair, and there is Sam, looking weary and so glad to see her. No, it is not the Glacier, but it is what she wishes it could have been for her: warm and with a purpose and a hope.

Lirael’s heart leaps uncomfortably at the thought. This is home. This is _her_ home, that she has never had before.

She does not have time to greet them before they are near, and Sabriel has rested her hand on her elbow and Sam is beaming, close enough that she can hug him, and this is what it is all meant to be, after all. 

“I’m home,” she announces, with the lights of the city on the horizon and the light of Winding Post all around them and no darkness at all, none near enough to touch any one of them, just for a moment.


End file.
